In the repair of a structure such as an aircraft, paper and digital repair records may be required for repair authorization. However, archiving of repair records may be a manual and imprecise process. Significant time and effort may be expended to locate the repair records when they are needed. Repair records may be particularly important if a new repair which is physically close to or affected by an earlier repair is needed.
Current maintenance and repair methods may require a time-intensive process of cleaning and removing corrosion prior to performing non-destructive testing (NDT) to check for further need for repair. Under circumstances in which the part having the repair surface had previously reached the limit for material removal, the part may require complete replacement, rendering the cleaning and corrosion removing process unnecessary.
Therefore, an onboard data archiving system and method are needed in which repair records are stored on a repair surface adjacent to or near a repair area of a structure and are easily downloaded and transmitted to maintenance engineering personnel.